Two recent appellate decisions have continued the courts' exploration of how the Supreme Court's Spokeo standing decision affects cases under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA). Both find that a debt collector's actions violated a right conferred on consumers by the statute and that the deprivation of the right was an injury sufficient to […]
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Law profs Stephen Burbank and Sean Farhang have written Politics, Identity, and Class Certification on the U.S. Courts of Appeals, which asks whether there are associations between personal characteristics of appellate judges and the party of the presidents who appointed those judges, among other things, and class-certification decisions. Here is the abstract: This article draws […]
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday affirmed the district court’s order certifying a class Facebook users in a case challenging Facebook’s facial-recognition technology as a violation of Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).The court held that plaintiffs alleged a concrete and particularized harm, sufficient to confer Article III standing, because BIPA protected the […]
Scotusblog this week posted an analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court's review of class action cases. Among its observations is that the Court overturns almost 70 percent of class action decisions made by appeals courts by either reversing or vacating these decisions. In addition, the analysis found that, between the 2010 and 2018 terms, the […]
The Washington Post reports today on debt collectors' tactics to revive debts that they cannot otherwise collect on because the statute of limitations has passed. If the consumer makes a payment, even against his or her own will, that can be used to try to revive the life of the debt. So debt collectors often […]
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission announced a $700 million settlement with Equifax concerning its liability for the 2017 data breach in which hackers stole the personal information of 147 million people. The settlement seemed to offer people as much as $125 in cash. In the week after the FTC announced the settlement, more than […]
by Paul Alan Levy What sort of showing must a criticized business make when it wants to identify an anonymous online critic on the theory that the critic was never an actual customer and that, consequently, any criticisms are necessarily false? Attorney Thomas P. Kelly III of Santa Rosa California That issue has been presented […]
The California Supreme Court today issued its unanimous decision in Noel v. Thrifty Payless Inc., which rejected a strict class-certification "ascertainability" requirement sometimes associated with decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. This paragraph sums up the issue and the court's conclusion: This case is a putative class action brought on […]
Professor Brian Fitzpatrick has a new book, set for release in October, called The Conservative case for Class Actions. Here is the summary: Since the 1960s, the class action lawsuit has been a powerful tool for holding businesses accountable. Yet years of attacks by corporate America and unfavorable rulings by the Supreme Court have left […]
That's the topic of The New Privity by law prof Alexi Lahav. I thought the article would be interesting to our readers, who (1) may be concerned about the Supreme Court's expanding due-process restrictions on where alleged corporate wrongdoers may be sued and (2) want products-liability law to remain robust and adaptable. Here is the […]